


Daughters of the Air

by ClawR



Series: Together with Remembrance of Ourselves [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Gen, Grief/Mourning, POV Female Character, canon-compliant through season 3b, canon-inspired but not canon-compliant through season 4, gratuitous literary references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 20:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4578060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClawR/pseuds/ClawR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only thing worse than grieving is grieving alone. So Lydia finds ways not to be alone.</p><p>Slightly A/U aftermath fic to season 3B. This is a companion fic to "Things That Go Bump in the Night," but is designed to be completely understandable as a stand-alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daughters of the Air

**Author's Note:**

> So, a year ago, I finished up "Things That Go Bump in the Night," and I thought, "I should do a Stiles PoV companion fic!" Then I sat down to write, and what came out was 8,000 words of Lydia introspection. This is totally unbeta-ed, and honestly I haven't edited it as much as I probably should have, but parts of it have been sitting with me for so long that I just need it out there. Constructive crit is, as always, welcomed and appreciated.
> 
> The songs for this fic are "On the Radio" by Regina Spektor and "Lull" by Andrew Bird.

_Lydia is in her bedroom, laying out her outfit for the next day, all engineered to match the cutest pair of wedges she’d been coveting at Beacon Hills’ sole boutique. She is in the zone. This is the greatest outfit that anyone has put together ever. This outfit will move mountains. This outfit will make statues weep._

_Or it will, if she can accessorize it right. She’s staring at her jewelry box, trying to decide between a dozen necklaces, but she can’t focus, because of the knocking. The knocking… Someone’s knocking at the door._

_Instantly, her focus shifts, and she turns away from her outfit to answer the door. On the other side, she finds Allison._

_“You’re dead,” Lydia says, aghast. She knows this bone-deep, even if she can’t remember exactly how it happened, right now. But Allison doesn’t look dead. She looks bright and cheerful and positively adorable. Her dimples are so deep that if you gaze long into them, they also gaze into you._

_“It worked!” Allison says, throwing up her arms triumphantly._

_“What worked?”_

_“Your cure!” Allison steps into the room and sweeps Lydia up into a bone-cracking hug. “You cured death!” ___

__Lydia wakes suddenly, brought out of her sleep by Prada’s high-pitched yips._ _

__“Shut _up_ , Prada,” she hisses. Prada, perched on Lydia’s cedar chest with her nose pointed out the window, does not listen. Lydia reluctantly disentangles herself from her bedclothes, picks Prada up, and brings her back to bed with her. Prada squirms for a few moments, unwilling to give up her campaign against the squirrel or the twig or the _whatever_ that was outside. Eventually, though, she settles down, and curls up with her chin resting lightly on Lydia’s leg._ _

__“Good girl,” Lydia says. She spends the rest of the night lazily scratching Prada’s ears and trying with all her might to return to her dream._ _

____

#

Not so very long ago, Lydia and Allison used to carpool to school. Lydia had by far the nicer car, so usually it was her in the driver’s seat and Allison riding shotgun, gossiping or strategizing or, on particularly obnoxious days, singing.

On days like today, with the light of Allison’s smile still shining in her mind from last night’s dream, Lydia feels her friend’s absence in the passenger seat like a physical thing, like Allison is somehow more _there_ dead than she ever was alive. She imagines Allison rolling her eyes at Lydia’s melancholy, reaching forward to turn the radio on to the awful alternative station that she liked.

Lydia rarely turns on the radio, these days. She’s afraid she might hear something other than music.

She rolls to a neat halt at the stop sign a mile from school, looks left then right then left again, and as usual, sees no one coming. Allison used to push against the wheel well with her feet when Lydia did this, as if it would make the car go faster, impatient with what she called Lydia’s “driver’s ed bullshit.”

“I didn’t survive a year of this supernatural freak show just to get T-boned by a pick-up driver who can’t follow the speed limit,” Lydia had told her.

As she accelerates into the empty intersection, Lydia wonders, idly, what she would give to make last night’s dream come true. If the Sea Witch from “The Little Mermaid” appeared in front of her right now and offered her a trade, what would be an acceptable price for Allison’s return to life?

Her car? No question. Her wardrobe? Have it. Her IQ? That one’s more of a wrench, but Lydia’s pretty sure she’d be okay taking remedial math, as long as Allison was taking it with her.

But that’s not how it works in fairy tales, is it? Resurrections can’t be paid for with clothes or cars. No, it’s a life for a life. What if the Sea Witch showed up and said, “You can have Allison if you give me Scott”?

Or Stiles?

Or her mom?

Lydia pulls into the parking lot with relief. She doesn’t think she should drive to school alone anymore.

#

Kira’s already in homeroom when Lydia arrives, flipping through her precalc textbook with one hand and scribbling in a notebook with the other, scrambling to finish the homework she should’ve done last night. She greets Lydia’s approach the way men wandering the desert greet clear, bubbling streams.

“What’s sin2(x) in terms of the cosine?” Kira begs.

“1 – cos(2x) divided by 2,” Lydia says immediately.

Kira vigorously erases some of her work and jots down a new answer. “You’re a genius, thank you, thank you!”

Inspiration strikes. “You know,” Lydia says, dropping into the seat next to Kira, “if you wanted to stop driving into school with your dad, I could always give you a ride.”

Kira looks up, inquisitive.

“It would give you a chance to do your homework in the car, away from prying eyes,” Lydia says.

“Oh, well, that’s really nice of you,” Kira stammers, an indelicate pink blush creeping into her face, “but I’m, um, well, I’ve been riding to school with Scott.”

“Oh!” Lydia says. “Well, that’s another story altogether, then, isn’t it?”

For the rest of homeroom, she feeds Kira trigonometric identities, doodles in her notebook, and wonders when she became the kind of person who didn’t notice Scott acquiring a new bike buddy.

#

Lydia and Scott have very few classes together. Most of Lydia’s subjects these days are AP, and while Scott has made an admirable effort at academic self-improvement, he’s not honors track material. Still, there’s no such thing as AP gym, and every Tuesday and Thursday, Lydia and Scott awkwardly partner in badminton, or awkwardly wait to be picked for volleyball teams, or awkwardly stand in line for the rope climb together.

“So,” Lydia says, accepting one of the school’s two least-ravaged tennis rackets from Scott, who had put on a little werewolf speed to snatch them up first. “You and Kira.”

Scott rubs the back of his head sheepishly. “Yeah, uh. Yeah. What about us?”

Lydia bounces her tennis ball a few times against the racket. “How’s that going?” She serves the ball to him, nice and easy. He swings and misses.

“It’s, um. It’s going,” Scott says. He retrieves the ball, serves it over the net, and sends it flying five feet above Lydia’s head. She levels an unamused look at him. “Whoops. Sorry.”

Really, though, Lydia thinks as she fetches the ball from the far end of the gym, it’s her own fault. She should’ve known better than to talk to Scott about Kira; it was bound to fluster him. It’s better than silence, though. Lydia and Scott have been doing silence a lot lately.

Allison used to take gym class with them. She kept the conversation flowing, and locked the three of them together in easy company. Lydia and Scott aren’t friends without her. Not really.

Lydia wonders if Scott feels Allison’s absence as acutely as she does. But that’s not the kind of thing you ask someone who’s not really your friend.

#

“Hey, Lydia, I don’t think tutoring’s gonna happen today,” Stiles says, his resignation clear even over a spotty cell phone connection.

Lydia sighs and starts putting away the carrot sticks and hummus she’d laid out for Malia’s visit. Her mother had taught her that hospitality is important, even if all you’re doing is studying Shakespeare.

“What happened?” she says.

“Nothing,” Stiles says, “I just can’t find her. She was in the bleachers during practice, but when I got out of the locker room, poof! No Malia.”

Lydia fumbles the carton of hummus, catching it just in time. “Is she okay? Do you think she’s hurt? Do you want me to come help look for her?”

Stiles laughs drily. “No, it’s fine, she does this all the time. Just takes off for a little while and turns up a few hours later. I just wish she wouldn’t do it when she has an appointment.”

“It’s no big deal,” Lydia says, because it really isn’t. Honestly, with a dead best friend and a dead boyfriend, what else was she going to do with her evening? “Let me know if you find her.”

“Yeah, all right,” Stiles says. He’s got a note of finality in his voice, like he’s about to hang up.

“Wait!” Lydia says. “I meant to ask you. Can you give me a ride into school tomorrow? My brakes are acting funny.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Stiles says.

“You’re a doll.” Lydia hangs up the phone, snags a carrot stick from the platter before she tucks it into the fridge, and goes to hide her perfectly functional car in the garage.

#

When Stiles’ Jeep rolls into the Martin driveway promptly at seven the next morning, Lydia is already waiting outside, shivering slightly in the pre-dawn chill. She refuses to ruin the line of her outfit with a coat. The warm interior of Stiles’ car is a welcome change, even if she does have to take the back seat; Malia is already in front.

“Hey, Malia!” she says cheerfully, trying to convey that there are no hard feelings about their missed tutoring session. “How’s that SOHCAHTOA worksheet coming along?”

Malia flicks a brief glance at Stiles, mutters something that _might_ be “fine,” and ducks her head down. Not a big chit-chatter, Malia. Lydia supposes coyotes don’t make a lot of small talk.

But Lydia certainly didn’t engineer a car pool under false pretenses just so she could ride in silence. “So,” she says, catching Stiles’ eyes in the rear view mirror, “did you know that Scott’s been driving Kira to school?”

“Uh, yeah,” Stiles says. “Like every day for a month.”

Lydia pouts. “You’re supposed to tell me these things. Who else can I rely on for hot werewolf gossip?”

The car goes still for a moment as Stiles and Lydia both think, _Allison_ , and Malia continues to gaze disinterestedly at her hands.

“So I’m supposed to report back to you whenever something changes in Scott’s love life?” Stiles says, picking up as if nothing happened.

“ _Yes_ ,” Lydia says.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Well, other than giving Kira a ride—entirely uneuphemistically, I might add—there’s nothing to report.”

Lydia clucks her tongue. “That boy needs to get a move on.”

“What can I say? Dude’s always been slow.” He grins at her in the rear view mirror.

“Oh,” Malia says out of nowhere, directing her words at Stiles. “You’re attracted to her.” _Her_ , in this case, pretty clearly means Lydia.

Stiles nearly runs the car off the road. “Malia, you can’t just… you can’t just _say_ things like that.”

Lydia turns her attention to the suburban housing complexes passing outside the window, and lets Stiles have it out with Malia. She knows Stiles is attracted to her, and she doesn’t mind. She kind of likes it, even, now that he’s gotten over his whole puppy-dog crush thing. Lydia always likes it when people are attracted to her. But she’s glad that Stiles isn’t wooing her anymore, and she’s even gladder that she’s not attracted to him in the slightest. She may not miss Aidan the way she misses Allison, but his loss hurts enough that she’s not sure she ever wants to feel that way about a boy again.

Which, come to think of it, probably explains Scott and Kira’s snail pace.

#

Stiles catches Lydia in the hallway as she leaves AP English.

“If Malia asks you about werewolf eyes today, tell her it’s genetic,” he pants, slowing down from a run to walk beside her.

“What are you talking about?”

“She was asking earlier why some betas have blue eyes and some have gold eyes, and I told her it was genetic, so back me up on this.”

Lydia turns a piercing glare onto Stiles. “Why would you tell her that?”

For once in his life, Stiles is unaffected by Lydia’s disdain. “What did you want me to do, tell her the truth? That’d be a fun conversation: ‘Yeah, Malia, your eyes are blue because you murdered your family, you monster.’”

“She’s going to find out eventually.”

“Not if no one tells her,” Stiles says, giving Lydia a rather pointed glare of his own.

Lydia comes _so close_ to telling Stiles to go fuck himself, that she’s not keeping any more secrets from his girlfriend for him. Because she’s on board with the whole “don’t tell Malia about Peter” thing, but only barely. She remembers being the person no one told anything to, even when the secrets they were keeping were about her. And it sucks. There’s no other word for it—it just sucks.

But Lydia doesn’t have many people left. She’s not sure what she’d do if Stiles stopped talking to her.

“Fine,” she says, packing the word with as much exasperation as she can.

“Thank you!” Stiles says. He spins on the spot, heading in the opposite direction for his own English class. “Meet me in the parking lot after class for your ride home.”

Lydia watches him walk away for a few steps. Something about what he’s just said is ringing wrong to her, and she’s not sure why, but she can’t let it be. “Stiles…”

He stops and looks back, eyebrows quirked inquisitively.

“She’s not a monster, you know.”

Stiles huffs a laugh as he turns back around. “It’s called rhetoric. Look it up.”

#

When Lydia arrives at the pack’s usual cafeteria table on Friday, she knows something’s up. Malia and Stiles—the group’s second- and third-biggest eaters, respectively—are nowhere to be found. She knows they’re at school today, because she rode in with them this morning.

“Where’s the gruesome twosome?” she asks Scott, prying open the container of quinoa salad she brought from home.

Scott glances at Kira in a clear silent call for help. Kira, wise and wonderful woman that she is, ignores him in favor of her sandwich. “Well,” he says uncomfortably, “I’m not sure where Malia is, but Stiles is probably in the library.”

“What happened?”

“What makes you think something happened?” Scott says unconvincingly.

“Your incredible poker face, for one.”

Scott grimaces. “Stiles had a panic attack in English.”

“So you left him in the library?”

“I tried to get him to come to lunch, but he wouldn’t! And then I tried to stay with him, but he threatened to...” Scott trails off with a wary look at Kira. “Divulge some embarrassing secrets.”

 _That_ makes Kira put down her sandwich. Lydia, however, doesn’t care what stupid thing Scott did as a kid, what teacher he had a crush on in sixth grade, or what humiliating mishap he’d had in his pre-wolf years. “And Malia?”

“She saw it and freaked out. I think I, uh, scared her off, actually.”

Meaning Malia probably isn’t even on the school grounds anymore. Lydia sighs and seals her salad back up.

“Where are you going?” Kira asks.

“To the library. Unlike your boyfriend, I have an unimpeachable character, and can’t be blackmailed.”

Lydia finds Stiles buried among the most remote shelves in the library, sitting on the floor right in front of a row of dusty books about cell biology. A print-out of the bestiary is open on his lap, but he’s not really focused on it. Even if Lydia hadn’t known he’d just had a panic attack, she’d have been able to tell something was wrong. There’s just something _off_ about him. 

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Stiles says, not even looking up.

Lydia’s throat swells; she remembers Allison saying the exact same thing to her, the night after her and Scott’s first break up.

“What a cliché,” she says, and sits down across from Stiles.

“Things become clichés for a reason. Go have lunch, Lydia, I’m fine.”

“You should have lunch too.”

Stiles shakes his head. “I’m never hungry, after.”

He looks exhausted. That’s what’s off about him; he’s so tired that he’s not moving, not twitching or jerking or tapping his fingers.

“Do you really want me to go?”

Stiles closes his eyes and leans his head back to rest against _Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher_. He says nothing for so long that Lydia starts to think the silence is his answer, and then he says, “No.”

#

Lydia’s surprised when Malia shows up for their tutoring session that evening, at 5 p.m. on the dot. She’d been so sure Malia was off Bear Grylls-ing in the woods that she hadn’t even laid out snacks.

“Is Stiles okay?” Malia says, in lieu of “hello.”

“He’s fine.” Lydia ushers Malia in the door. “You haven’t seen him?”

Malia swings her backpack off and clutches it to her chest like a teddy bear. “I wasn’t sure if I should.”

“What did Scott _say_ to you?”

“Nothing. I just… he’s really okay?”

Lydia gently pulls Malia’s backpack out of her white-knuckled grip, and immediately regrets it; Malia looks lost without it, her hands hanging unmoored in the air. Still, giving it back would be unspeakably awkward, so Lydia sets it on a chair.

“Go see him,” Lydia says. “We can study another time.”

“No.” Malia shoves her backpack to the floor and takes its place in the chair. “I’ll see him later.”

“Really, go. If you’re worried about him, you should go see for yourself he’s okay.”

“Are you going to teach me some Shakespeare, or am I going to have to copy my paper off of Wikipedia again?”

So Lydia takes Malia through _Hamlet_. It’s strange, as the whole Shakespeare unit has been. Lydia read all the Bard’s plays years ago—even Titus Andronicus—but revisiting them with Malia is an entirely distinct experience. Ever since Allison’s death, Lydia’s been reading all her old books with new eyes. Stories she used to love don’t speak to her anymore; stories she’d thought she’d understood have revealed hidden meanings. Grief is like a code word, scrambling some messages and unlocking others.

 _Hamlet_ makes a lot more sense to her, this time around.

Without Stiles to rush Malia out the door, the study session goes long. Malia, Lydia thinks, must be desperate to put off seeing Stiles, because she doesn’t even leave when the studying’s over. After they finish with Shakespeare, Lydia and Malia snack on Wednesday’s carrot sticks and have their first-ever casual conversation. 

“Sucks to be Horatio,” Malia says, dipping a carrot into the hummus and pulling up several tablespoons-full.

“What do you mean? He’s the only one who lives.”

“Easier to be dead than the last guy standing in a pile of bodies.”

Lydia crunches down on a carrot and considers the possibility that Malia gets Shakespeare better than she does.

#

The next week is Lydia’s best since Allison died. Nothing particularly great happens, but everything _works_ in a way that it hasn’t in months. Kira tells Lydia blushingly during homeroom that she and Scott have rounded another base; Stiles doesn’t have any more panic attacks, at least not where anyone can see him; and Malia, though a little distant and unfocused during study sessions, is as friendly to Lydia as she’s ever been. Lydia tells Stiles that her car repair ran into complications, and coughs up some gas money to make herself feel better about the lie. Anything to stretch this small contentment as far as it will go.

The first sign that the good times are ending comes on Friday morning. Stiles and Malia are silent the whole ride into school, answering Lydia’s questions in monosyllables and avoiding eye contact with each other and with her. Lydia fancies herself a student of the human condition, which is to say that any idiot could see something’s up with them. Unfortunately, her studies have not yet taught her how to reach inside her friends’ heads and fix their problems. She wishes she could, not—she thinks with a squirm—out of any benevolent impulse, but selfishly, because Stiles’ and Malia’s silence leaves too much space for the noise in her head.

The longer it lasts, though, the more the silence worries her. Stiles drifts during calculus, startling to attention when Ms. Klein calls his name. Malia clenches her fingers as she and Lydia walk from the science wing to the Spanish corridor, leaving angry indentations in her palms that vanish with werewolf quickness when she finally loosens her fingers to pick up a highlighter. Lunch is positively funereal, a word Lydia has new respect for. Scott and Kira have picked up on the tension, and the conversation seems to be weighed down with lead.

After school, Lydia goes to meet Stiles for her ride home, and finds him slumped against the driver-side door of his car, staring dead-eyed at the steering wheel. The prospect of another 15 unspeaking minutes in the back of the Jeep breaks her.

“You look tired,” Lydia says.

Stiles flails back to life, spinning to face her. “Jesus, give a guy some warning.”

“Excessive startle response is commonly associated with drowsiness.” And trauma, but they don’t talk about that.

“I’m fine to drive. Just didn’t get as much sleep as I wanted last night.”

Lydia pins Stiles’ eyes with her own. She loads her words down with as much meaning as she can. “Stiles. You look _tired_.”

He wiggles ten fingers in the air. “Don’t worry. I’ve already counted.”

Never in Lydia’s life has she wanted so badly to hit someone who wasn’t actively trying to kill her. She’s _sick_ of this, sick of not talking, sick of the way the things they don’t say mean so much more than the things they do. A thousand unspoken words line the inside of her skull like insulation, keeping the sound in and the silence out.

“Don’t do that,” she says.

“Do what?”

“Turn it into a joke.”

Stiles twists his lips into a purely mechanical smile. “Everything’s a joke to me.”

“No it isn’t, don’t be stupid. It’s beneath you.”

Stiles slams the heel of his hand into the door of the Jeep. He’s angry, and he looks a bit—just the smallest bit, just because of the inevitable fact of his face—like the Nogitsune did, the moment before Kira ran a sword through it. “What do you want from me, Lydia?” 

“I want you to be okay!” But that’s both too much to ask and not quite right. “I want you to tell me the truth. Are you okay?”

For a moment, Lydia thinks he might cry, or he might scream at her. Something she said seems to have brought him up short. He’s frozen, staring at her, like he’s not sure what to do next.

Then he kisses her.

In the moment, Lydia doesn’t know what she’s feeling, except for a simultaneous repulsion and attraction. She wants to break the kiss, and she wants to lean into it. And of course, she knows it feels familiar, both the act of kissing—which she’s done hundreds or thousands of times before—and the act of kissing _Stiles_ , which she’s done only once.

That’s all she has time to register before Malia says “Stiles,” and the kiss breaks apart with the force of nuclear frisson. Malia certainly looks like someone who’s been caught in an atomic blast.

“Oh, God, Malia,” Stiles says.

Lydia still doesn’t have full access to her emotions, but she knows she doesn’t want to be here for the fallout. She heads toward the bank of waiting school buses. “I’m going to take the bus.”

Stiles calls after her, but Lydia’s no longer listening.

#

In the safety of her kitchen, Lydia picks herself apart. With a little distance, it’s not hard to untangle what she felt when Stiles kissed her. She was sad, because it reminded her of Aiden, and she was angry at Stiles. For kissing her when he has a girlfriend, for kissing her when he knows she doesn’t like him like that, but mostly for kissing her at all. She doesn’t want romance. Falling in love is terrifying. It’s like inviting a dagger to hover above your heart, knowing it could fall at any moment. Lydia doesn’t know how Scott does it. She envies him, and she pities him.

Despite all of that, part of Lydia wanted the kiss to continue. Some synapse had registered Stiles’ lips only as contact, as connection, as a moment of warmth after months of cold. It was wrong. The kiss didn’t bring Stiles and Lydia closer; it was just one more way of shutting down the conversation. But Lydia couldn’t be held responsible for every little neuron in her head.

The doorbell rings as the microwave clock flips to 5:00. It takes Lydia a dazed moment to remember that today’s Friday, and she and Malia have tutoring. Sure enough, Lydia opens the door to find Malia on the stoop, looking so lost Lydia wants to ask her if she’s come to the right house.

Lydia should talk to her about the kiss. And she’s planning to. But she needs a moment to psych herself up for the conversation, and maybe Malia does too, because they play out the script of a normal tutoring session for a few minutes. Lydia invites Malia inside, offers her refreshments, and makes idle chit-chat about academics. Until Malia, with predictable frankness, breaks character.

“Why did you kiss him?”

“Excuse me?” Lydia sets down the bottle of Perrier she’d been preparing to pour.

“You don’t like Stiles, so why did you kiss him?”

Lydia doesn’t know why she expected Malia to know who had initiated the kiss. But she had been preparing for a conversation about Stiles, not about herself, and the injustice of it—of being kissed, and reminded of her dead boyfriend, and having intimacy dangled in front of her when it was impossible for her to accept it, and then being _confronted_ about it—is too much.

“I _didn’t_ kiss him, he kissed me. And I’d like to know why you’re interrogating me and making out with him. Because yes, I saw that, along with half the school.” Lydia opens the Perrier. It bubbles over the lip of the bottle and onto the counter. “And I take it back. You can’t have any of my soda.”

Her anger partially vented, Lydia lets herself carefully collapse into a chair. She regrets her outburst a little bit. Malia will probably run away now, and their fledgling friendship will be ruined. Malia’s not to blame for any of Lydia’s real problems; she just made a bad assumption at a bad time. But Lydia’s not going to walk her words back. All of them were true, and most of them, she thinks, needed to be said. Lydia’s been alone for a long time now. She can take being alone.

But Malia doesn’t leave. She stands at the edge of the kitchen, still and watchful in a way that’s more animal than any social faux-pas. Lydia ignores her like she ignores the wild deer that sometimes wander into her yard, so that she won’t spook them away.

“I’m sorry,” Malia says.

After all that waiting, it turns out to be Lydia who startles. “What?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I assumed… I’m sorry.”

Lydia has never heard Malia say “sorry” once, let alone four times within ten seconds. Stiles still reminds her to say “please” and “thank you.” Just yesterday, she nearly shoved a freshman to the floor in order to get past him into her locker.

What sheer effort that it must have cost Malia to sort through her role in this complicated situation. What dedicated thought it must have taken to set aside her own legitimate fear and worry and confusion and decide that she owed someone an apology. It makes Lydia proud to be her friend.

Lydia gets to her feet and hugs Malia, who looks overwhelmed. “Oh, honey. You are so incredibly forgiven.”

The hug lasts until Malia starts to squirm. Lydia lets her go. “It’s probably silly to ask, considering the making out, but are you and Stiles okay?”

“Yeah,” Malia says, her tone indicating that it was, in fact, silly to ask. Lydia lets that go, too. After all, she’d gotten back together with an actual murderer, albeit a contrite one; she doesn’t have any business judging who Malia forgives.

#

Lydia texts Stiles later that night, telling him her car has been fixed and she won’t need a ride next week. She expects to get a return text—or even a phone call—within five minutes, but the phone stays silent.

She passes Stiles on her way to homeroom on Monday. He looks down when he sees her, and she knows instantly that he’s hoping she won’t stop. It’s outrageous. It’s unfair. _He’s_ the one who kissed her. Lydia should be the one avoiding _him_.

Fine, then. That’s what she’ll do. She doesn’t need Stiles. She doesn’t need anyone. Needing people isn’t an option in a world where friends can disappear between one breath and the next.

Lydia lifts her chin and walks by like she’s never heard the name Stiles Stilinski.

#

On Wednesday, Malia misses her tutoring session. Lydia calls her, gets no answer, and shrugs it off. The girl deserves a break.

On Thursday, Lydia waits outside Malia’s chemistry class so they can walk together to their respective English classes, the way they do every Tuesday and Thursday. But when chemistry lets out, Malia doesn’t even look at Lydia. She passes by like Lydia’s not even there.

“I think Malia’s avoiding me,” Lydia tells Scott that afternoon, as they walk the track in gym class.

“She’s avoiding all of us,” Scott says.

“Why?”

Scott looks at her like she’s said something stupid, which is not a look Lydia gets a lot. “She found out about Peter. Didn’t Stiles tell you?”

Lydia’s pretty sure Scott knows about the kiss—it had, after all, been extremely public—but apparently he hasn’t picked up on the fact that she and Stiles haven’t spoken since Friday. She considers extending the charade, but in the end, she’s just too exhausted to do it.

“No,” she says. “I guess he didn’t.”

After school, Lydia goes to Malia’s house. Maybe it’s pushy, maybe it’s impolite, given that Malia’s made it clear she doesn’t want to talk to her, but Malia deserves an apology. A real, face-to-face apology, and all the answers that Lydia can give her.

Mr. Tate is mowing the lawn when Lydia arrives. Lydia’s never seen him this close before, and what strikes her is that he looks worn through, like paper that’s been crumpled and pressed flat and crumpled again until it’s falling apart completely. It’s hard to believe he can push the lawn mower, he looks so tired. Lydia wonders: Is that what grief does to a person over the years? Does it grind them down to nothing?

Lydia rings the doorbell and waits thirty seconds, one minute, two. She knocks on the door. No one comes. She knocks again.

“She’s not coming.”

Lydia jumps. She hadn’t noticed the sudden silence as the lawn mower stopped, but it has, and Mr. Tate is standing at the edge of the lawn, leaning on the handle and staring at her.

“Isn’t she home?”

“She’s home. But she’s not coming.”

Lydia stares at him. She’s not sure what she should say. She’s not even sure what she’s _allowed_ to say; she’s so out of the loop, she doesn’t know what Mr. Tate knows.

Mr. Tate wipes sweat from his forehead. “I don’t know my daughter very well. We don’t talk much. But I see things, you know? I know you’re her friend. I know she’s mad at you, and all the others. I don’t know why.” He looks down at the grass he’s just mowed, and for a terrifying second, Lydia thinks he might cry. “I figure she’ll talk when she’s ready.”

Life is funny. A few months ago, while trying to save Malia, Lydia nearly lost a leg to a trap this man set, and was saved by Stiles. Now, Mr. Tate is the only one of the three of them she’s speaking to.

“If it seems right,” Lydia says, “If she seems ready, could you tell her I said I’m sorry? Tell her Lydia says she’s sorry.”

Mr. Tate nods, and turns the mower back on.

#

In the days after Allison’s death, Lydia kept up a running counter. _The world has been without Allison Argent for 24 hours. The world has been without Allison Argent for one week. The world has been without Allison Argent for thirteen days._

On Friday, the world has been without Allison Argent for exactly three months.

Lydia’s not talking to Stiles, and Malia’s not talking to Lydia, and Lydia _can’t_ talk to Scott, and Allison will never talk to any of them ever, ever again, and Lydia opens her mouth and _screams_.

The scream clears everything out, fills Lydia’s head until there’s no pain, no loss, no confusion, just her and the noise and the empty space where her love used to be. It stretches on timelessly, one single, blessedly blank moment, a rushing river of oblivion.

It dies, and the world fades back in: the last orange light of the dying sunset glinting on the countertops, the persistent hum of the refrigerator, the goosebumps prickling along her shoulders. Her phone is lit up with texts, from Malia, from Derek, even from Isaac all the way over in France, and a single call has gotten through, ringing merrily into the cold kitchen. Scott, of course.

Lydia picks up. “I’m all right,” she says, though that’s questionable.

“What happened? Is someone dying? What’s going on?” Scott is frantic, and Lydia can imagine the scene that must have just played out. After three months of supernatural radio silence, the banshee wails, and their entire defective pack stops in its place and howls in fear of whatever new, horrifying threat has suddenly appeared.

“No, it’s nothing like that, everyone’s fine, it’s just…” Lydia’s breath hitches, and the dam breaks. She’s crying. “Can I see you?”

“Of course,” Scott says, his voice gone soft. “Stiles and I will be right over.”

“No! Just you.”

A moment’s silence, as Scott presumably weighs the difficulty of keeping Stiles from Lydia’s side at a moment like this. “Okay,” he says at last. “I’ll be right there.”

#

Lydia has mostly cleaned up by the time Scott arrives. Her face is washed, her hair is brushed, her earrings have been switched out for a pair that match her outfit _much_ better, and she’s liberated three bottles of wine—one white, one red, one rosé—from the cellar.

She shoves the white and the rosé into Scott’s hands the moment she opens the door. “Come on,” she says. “We’re going out back.”

“Uh, Lydia,” Scott says, trailing her out to the patio. “What’s going on? You screamed.”

Lydia sits at the edge of the pool, letting her bare feet dangle in the water. She sets the merlot, two stemless wine glasses, and a corkscrew down on her left. “I wasn’t predicting anything. It was just… too much. It’s the three-month anniversary.”

“I know,” Scott says.

Lydia pats the brick on her right, and Scott kicks off his shoes and obligingly sits beside her. “I thought you only screamed when you sensed death,” he says. “I didn’t know it could happen when you were just… sad.”

“There’s a lot we don’t know,” Lydia says. But she didn’t call Scott here to talk about her banshee whatever. She glances around the patio, breathes deep, and brings to mind a time when it was full of lights and music and people she barely knew. “Remember my birthday party?”

Scott stares at her like she’s on a tightrope, tipping over and about to fall. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “You poisoned us with wolfsbane.”

“Allison gave me an adorable purse,” she says. “It was vintage. One of the last things she had left from the boutique her mom worked at in San Francisco. I tried to give it back to her when her mom died, but she wouldn’t take it. Maybe it was good to get rid of the reminder. It was stitched with these little purple flowers. I thought they were crocuses, but we looked them up later, and they were wolfsbane. Naturally.”

She grins at her hands, remembering Allison’s face when she’d realized. When she looks up, Scott is crying.

“I thought we could talk about her,” Lydia says. “It’s not fair for you to talk to Kira about it, and we can’t talk to Stiles, but I thought the two of us could. Because I don’t know about you, but I need to.”

But Scott must need to too, because he’s nodding before she can even finish talking, nodding and drying his eyes on his sleeve.

“I wouldn’t bother. You’re just going to cry again.” She offers him one of the wine glasses. “Red, white, or rosé?”

“You know I can’t get drunk, right?”

Lydia smirks and pushes the glass into his hand. “Come on, Scott. Get into the spirit of the thing.”

#

Saturday morning, Lydia arrives at Stiles’ front door at 11 a.m. Her hair is French-braided, her heels unscuffed, and she drank a grande skinny vanilla latte on the drive over. She’s ready for battle.

Sheriff Stilinski answers the door. He looks like he could use a weekend at a resort, or just a really stiff drink. It’s possible he looks like that all the time, but he’s not in uniform this morning. Without the gloss of authority, he looks like a manicure without a finish coat, chipping away at the edges. Or maybe the uniform has nothing to do with it; maybe Lydia’s only noticing now because she saw Mr. Tate recently, and the Sheriff’s exhaustion looks a little bit like his.

“Good morning, Sheriff. Is Stiles home?” Stiles’ Jeep is in the driveway, so Lydia’s only asking out of courtesy.

“He and Malia are up in his room,” the Sheriff says. “Go ahead up.”

“Malia’s here?” Scott had made it sound like she and Stiles were on the outs.

“Is that a problem?”

A huge problem. Insurmountable. Lydia should go home right now.

“Not at all,” she says cheerfully, and flounces past.

She can hear Stiles and Malia arguing from the landing. “That doesn’t make any _sense_ ,” Malia says.

“It makes _perfect_ sense, you’re just not _listening_.”

Lydia walks in without knocking. Stiles and Malia are on the floor, notebooks and textbooks strewn between them, with body language straight out of a high-noon showdown. They look up when she enters, and their expressions switch from anger and frustration to identical looks of bewilderment.

“What?” Lydia says. “You didn’t hear me come in? I thought werecoyotes had super hearing.”

Malia seems to weigh her annoyance at Lydia against her annoyance with having her coyote skills undervalued, and finds the latter to be heavier. “I was distracted by Stiles’ terrible tutoring.”

Stiles shoots her an affronted look, but doesn’t argue the point. “What are you doing here? Are you okay? What was that scream? Scott says nobody died, but he wouldn’t…”

“I’m hear to talk,” Lydia interrupts. “I think it’s long past time we did.”

Malia starts gathering her books. “I’m gonna head out.”

“You don’t have to,” Lydia says. “This… well, it doesn’t concern you, exactly, but you probably deserve to hear it. If you want.”

Malia sits back on her haunches, not quite leaving and not quite staying. Lydia turns to Stiles, who has the frozen look of a man who sees a train bearing down on him and knows he can’t move in time. She’s been practicing what she wants to say for hours, but suddenly all the words have slipped from her head.

“Stiles…”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know I screwed up, and Lydia, I’m so, so sorry.”

Lydia shakes her head. It seems like “sorry” is all anyone ever says anymore, and she’s sick of it. “You’ve mentioned. Ten or twenty times. You’re forgiven. I should’ve said that earlier.”

Stiles sits very, very still, like he might breathe wrong and destroy everything.

“You’re not going to kiss me again,” Lydia says.

“No. No, of course not. Honestly, I don’t know why I did it. It was stupid. It was stupid, and out of line, and hurtful…”

Lydia rolls her eyes. “Calm down, Stiles. It’s not like you killed someone.”

The air goes thin with tension, as everyone avoids everyone else’s eyes and tries not to think about a deputy, 12 people at the hospital, Aiden, Allison. With great effort, Lydia draws breath. “Someday, I swear, we’re going to have a conversation with no awkward pauses.”

Malia laughs like she does everything, loudly and abruptly and with little regard for how it looks. After a moment, Stiles joins in.

“What I meant to say is, it wasn’t that bad. I mean, if I thought you did it because you wanted to sneak around behind Malia’s back, that would be one thing. But that’s not you. I don’t think that’s why you did it.”

A flash of curiosity overwhelms the anxiety and embarrassment in Stiles’ eyes. “Why do you think I did it?”

Why does anyone do anything? Lydia has long suspected that the stories that people tell themselves about the reasons behind their actions are mostly fictions, made up after the fact. But she has a theory, and she’s willing to bet it’s as good as any.

“You’d know that better than me. But I guess I think you were tired and upset, and I was trying to help you, and for a moment it got mixed up with the way you used to feel about me. It was transference.”

Stiles swallows hard. “Maybe.”

“It doesn’t matter. You weren’t trying to hurt anyone, I think, so it doesn’t matter. It just can’t happen again. Not just because it’s not fair to Malia…”

“I don’t care if he kisses you,” Malia says. “We broke up.”

Lydia’s stunned silence lasts long enough for Stiles to bury his face in his hands and groan. “You did? When?”

“When she found out about Peter,” Stiles mumbles.

“But you’re still… I mean, he’s tutoring you.”

Malia shrugs. “Gotta be friends with someone.”

A few feelings war for dominance inside Lydia: shock and dismay that Stiles and Malia had been broken up for days and she hadn’t heard; sadness that a couple she’d been pulling for had split up; and a faint sense of injustice that Malia had cut Lydia out of her life, but had not meted out the same punishment to Stiles for the same crime. She pushes all of that aside for later. Right now, she still has to say her piece.

“Well, be that as it may, I can’t do romance right now. But I need you in my life, Stiles. You’re my best friend.”

“No, I’m not. That’s…” Stiles chokes off the end of the sentence.

“Allison’s dead,” Lydia says. After so many months of silence, of talking around everything that matters, the words hit like a body falling to the ground. It’s ugly and it’s horrible, but it needs to be dealt with. “You’re my best friend. I need to be able to talk to you, and carpool with you, and make sure you’re all right. I’ll lose my mind otherwise. So can we just be okay?”

Stiles stares her down, with that curiously intense stare of his, the one that lets you know that in this moment, you are the center of his world. “If you’re okay, I’m okay. Always.”

It feels like the moment after Lydia gets the results back on a difficult test, when the worry fades into relief and elation, and the leftover adrenaline leaves her woozy. She giggles. “We’re all so fucked up, you know?” Stiles glares, and she laughs. “Don’t act like it’s some big secret. We are. But at least we’re fucked up together.”

“Can I be fucked up together too?”

Malia is leaning toward Stiles and Lydia. Her face is utterly blank, the way Lydia knows it gets when she’s feeling most vulnerable. It strikes Lydia how much she’s missed Malia, these past few days. It hadn’t occurred to her that Malia might have missed her just as much. There are things they still have to say to each other—apologies and forgivenesses and probably Shakespearian soliloquy levels of explanation from Lydia—but for now, maybe this is enough.

“You are always welcome,” Lydia says, “to be fucked up together with me.”

#

Today, the world has been without Allison Argent for four months.

Scott came over after dinner, and they went outside to sit by the pool, like they had the first night. Two hours later, the stars are out, the wine is mostly gone, and they’re both a little hoarse and waterlogged. At some point, they moved from sitting to lying side by side, their feet still dangling in the water. Lydia is shivering, but she doesn’t want to move.

“Do you think she’s still out there, somewhere?” Scott says, breaking a minute-long silence.

Lydia considers Orion’s belt, stretched out above her. “Like, in the afterlife?” She sees Scott’s nod in her peripheral vision. “Do you?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Scott says. “I mean, I don’t know about Heaven, or whatever, but I guess I don’t think someone like Allison could just… stop _being_.”

That’s nice to think about, that Allison was so strong, so big, that even death can’t end her. It’s nice to think of her set in the sky as a constellation, like Artemis, the huntress, did for Orion in the myth. It’s nice to think about, but being nice doesn’t make it so.

“Did you ever read ‘The Little Mermaid’?” she says, idly stretching her hand up into the air. From this angle, it looks as though she could pluck the stars from the sky.

“The movie?”

Lydia rolls her eyes. “No, idiot, the story the movie’s based on. By Hans Christian Andersen.”

“I didn’t even know there _was_ a story.”

“That’s because you’re uncultured.”

“Do you have a point?”

Lydia kicks at his foot, splashing them both with water. “So, in the story, there are mermaids and there are humans. And mermaids live a long time, like 300 years, while humans live short little human lives. But when humans die, their immortal souls live on in Heaven. When mermaids die, they don’t go anywhere. They just turn into sea foam, and that’s it. And in the story, that’s why the little mermaid wants to be human. So that she can have an immortal soul.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think Allison has an immortal soul. I think she’s just so much sea foam.”

Scott lets that sit for a moment. “Well, what’s the point, then?” he says. He sounds angry, not with the anger of a werewolf, but with the anger of a teenage boy who only just realized that life isn’t fair. “If we’re all just gonna disappear, what the hell are we even doing?”

Lydia turns her head from the sky to look at Scott. She considers him for a long, long time before she rolls her head back up to the stars.

“When the little mermaid dies, she doesn’t go to Heaven, and she doesn’t turn into foam. She becomes a daughter of the air. And the daughters of the air, they can have immortal souls, but they have to work for them. They have to earn them by doing good deeds.”

“So?”

“So I think we’re all like daughters of the air. We earn our immortality through our impact on others. We live exactly as long as the effects of our actions. Allison saved my life. She saved Stiles’ life. She anchored you, and she made her father a better person, and she… she taught me how to be a friend. We’re all a part of her immortality.”

Lydia and Scott lie next to each other, listening to the neighbors’ sprinkler start up, feeling the rough brick beneath their backs, letting the stars inebriate them more thoroughly than wine ever could. Lydia wonders how much more Scott is seeing and hearing and feeling than she is, right now. She wonders what it would be like to be in his head.

“Lydia?” Scott says.

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad you’re part of my immortality.” 

Lydia smiles. She grabs his hand and holds on tight, and it feels as though her grip might keep them from falling into the night sky.


End file.
